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Sfinxul (2010)

by T.S. Learner(Favorite Author)

3.36 of 5 Votes: 4

languge

English

genre

Historical Fiction

publisher

Litera International

review 1: Perhaps a little bit more than another apocalyptic thriller because of the depth of scholarship and the sense of place.Here a young geophysicist finds himself in possession of an ancient Egyptian relic. Ostensibly a mechanical device to calculate astronomical events, people in Ancient Egypt and 1970s Egypt too believe it has powers over the weather and can even cause earthquakes. There is at least a very real fear that some people in Egypt would use it to sabotage the Egyptian -Israeli Peace Accord which is being set up in the background of the events in this novel.Oliver Warnock's mission becomes one of finding out who wants the astrarium, keeping it from them and finally working out how he can place it beyond the hands of anyone who would misuse its powers.This novel ha... mores less tension than the da Vinci Code because the element of the chase is less central to the action, the evil villain is too much a shadowy background figure and the puzzle aspect is less engaging and surfaces late in the novel.The choice of the first person narrative may be part of this weakness since the narrator can not switch between characters and events. Thus in the da Vinci Code Silas is a menace because we know what he is up to as much as we know what Robert Landon is doing, and we also know first hand about the greater political events between Opus Dei and the Pope. In Sphinx, we only know what Mosry is doing when he is hard on Oliver's heels and we learn about Sadat's diplomacy through characters telling about it to Oliver
review 2: I wasn't sure whether to read this one or not. From the Kindle Sample, I could tell the writing quality wasn't great but I'm always willing to overlook that for the sake of a good story - especially when it involves history and an ancient mystery. But for a number of reasons, the book just didn't grip me. A lot of the characters, even scholars, whole heartedly believed in the spirituality and religion of the ancient Egyptians and I'm not sure how realistic that is in modern day times, even for the city of Alexandria. The main character, a self proclaimed atheist, seemed uncharacteristically prone to spiritual beliefs from the beginning. Given the spiritual context of the book, I expected him to have a change of heart by the end but from only about a third of the way in, he was quick to consider the ideas that his dead wife's spirit was following him around in the manifestation of a bird and that her "Ba" could not ascend to heaven. What's worse, there was no reasonable explanation for the quick abandonment of his atheism - he had not seen or experienced anything undeniable spiritual that might have challenged his beliefs.So the character development wasn't great in my opinion and I don't think it was written well enough to really pull off the heavy supernatural and mystical context. It was slow paced and tried to be too poetic for a novel seemingly targeted at a Da-Vinci-Code-style genre.It was also too long. I don't normally consider 560 pages a long book but it was too long for such a poorly written book. Had it been more like 350-400 pages, I would have been more likely to stick with it until the end but instead, I gave up about half way through. It's a shame because I thought the basic concept had a lot of potential. less

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